One another, p.6
One Another, page 6
None of Jessie’s eight siblings attend the civil ceremony at St George Hanover Square Registry Office. Afterwards they lunch with Jessie’s mother—a witness to the marriage and a widow who does not like foreigners—in a small restaurant a few steps from Victoria Station. Roast beef and potatoes with plum pudding and custard to conclude. Then they travel on trains and ferries via Southampton to St Malo.
The honeymoon is disastrous. Notwithstanding oriental adventures and sailor opportunities, there is no evidence, his biographers claim, of any sexual experience before Jessie. Joseph is pathologically ‘reserved’ and proper. See him turn away, jittery, to light the bowl of his pipe and to gaze out the lacy window of their pension, wondering what on earth he has done.
On their wedding night he does not come to bed at all, preferring to catch up on his correspondence and to write a short story—in which a woman who has produced four mentally defective children kills her husband with scissors while repelling his sexual advances. She then kills herself.
‘In likelihood,’ Joseph wrote, ‘the bleakest story ever written during a honeymoon.’
Jessie responds with three days of illness, taking to the bed, alone, and then Joseph, ‘horribly scared’ (his own words), also becomes ill. His blackwater fever and gout return, pitching him into a dramatic collapse. He raves in Polish and shivers for a week. His inflammations are acute, scarlet and exceedingly painful. His urine is black; his whole body is distraught. He does not recognise Jessie and she does not understand what is happening.
In likelihood the bleakest honeymoon ever to become a story.
See the bed. See how the sheets are twisted and baggy, how like the signs of post-coital disorder with dozy lovers rising, nonplussed with intimacy, coy but delighted, unable to stop reaching for each other as if needing to prove this intensification is real. But no. No such spirit expanding with the gift of another body.
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Helen woke to a memory of her second year in Hobart and her first boy-kiss. She was eleven years old and their class was taken on an excursion, a visit by bus to a local apple farm. They had spent the day before being instructed on the importance of apples. Their teacher, Miss Conlan, wrote ‘The Importance of Apples’ on the blackboard and told them a jaunty narrative about William Bligh, commander of the Bounty, planting seven apple trees on Bruny Island in 1788. Then she went on to describe convicts planting pips (desperation, hunger) and numerous assorted worthies cultivating trees in a row. Under ‘Apple Pioneers’ she wrote ‘George Peacock’ and ‘Henry Jones’. The importance of jams, jellies and ciders to supplement the fresh fruit market. Miss Conlan wrote ‘Supplement’, so that they would learn a new word. It was a tedious lesson. It was difficult in the abstract to care about apples.
But Helen enjoyed the excursion. The bus drove on a winding road into the Huon Valley, just missing one wallaby on the way, and pulled straining onto a gravel track in the middle of an apple orchard. At the end of the track stood a wooden packing shed and a smaller building that once housed seasonal pickers; beyond that, a hops kiln and a rough patch of car park. Either side, extending as far as she could see, were laden apple trees in orderly rows, more apples, her father would have said, than you can poke a stick at. They saw the copper still, for making apple brandy, and listened to an old man with white hair sprouting from his ears lecture them on the history of the apple industry. After that they were left to wander, to see the press and the tin-making machine and the various boxes, colourfully illustrated, in which apples were sent abroad.
Ah, the boxes. Surrealist logic. Pasted on the boxes were labels of fantastical incongruity; her favourites were a peacock, tail open, standing on a giant apple, the triangular shape of Tasmania made into a faceted diamond, apples of several varieties reshaped to fit the coastline of the Apple Isle. There were boomerangs, poppies, red ribbons and stars, all of them standing in for apples. A boy beside her, Jimmy, orange and speckled, was also fascinated. Unlike the other boys, gathering around machinery, mucking about, trying to pull at each other’s shirts, he too studied the gallery of arty boxes. He too liked the peacock and its silly disproportion. They shyly agreed that the peacock box was the best.
‘Cadmium red,’ he said, pointing to one of the illustrations. Apple scent hung in the air, as if the colour had vaporised.
Jimmy later kissed Helen behind the toilets. It was not a pash, not an extended kiss, no groping involved, but something earnest, blushing and swift. She associated his mouth and his kiss with the scent that even there, in that degraded and hidden space, flowed with a ripening red fullness around them.
She’d forgotten this simple, sentimental scene. She’d mostly forgotten Jimmy, who may have been bullied for his orange looks, or for his tentative manner.
Jimmy’s father murdered his mother, bashed her with a brick, a few months later. Everyone spoke of it. One of the boys in grade seven said that he saw the blood. Jimmy disappeared from school and no one knew what became of him.
∼
In retrospect the kiss had a fateful quality; it was not a beginning, but an early goodbye. Helen recalled herself yielding and was pleased to have attracted a boy. She recalled Jimmy’s intensity and concentration. He had closed his eyes and touched her forearm. He had pensively stroked. She intuited the body surrealistically overloaded: cadmium red, apples and, later, bloody bricks.
Helen thought of Jimmy now, as she returned her Conrad books to the library. With her heavy load, from which she’d laboriously erased her annotations, she walked through the spaces of Newnham College, tracking the path along the hedge of Clare Road, past the sports ground and into the gardens. It was an overcast morning, nippy and cool, and she felt a sadness returning her books; and this only the first load, since she had borrowed so many. It was relinquishment of a kind; it was a divestment. It was the question—existentially—of what she might become.
And now these other matters were returning, these other selves unread or unwritten. A boy’s face, his lips, the force of complicity and the supplement story that might have unfolded.
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Parallel lives:
He might have made money as a skull collector.
Uncle Tadeusz knew Izydor Kopernicki, Poland’s first professor of anthropology at the Jagiellonian University, in Kraków. Kopernicki, he wrote, wanted to commission Joseph to collect skulls on his travels for a museum devoted to craniology. He must record both the provenance and former possessor, if known, of each skull. He must be scientific.
We have no knowledge of how or whether Joseph responded to this request. Did he collect skulls? Even one or two? It was a lucrative trade in the 1880s and big money changed hands. But as a sailor Joseph never had big money.
Everyone who has read Heart of Darkness recalls the fence at Kurtz’s compound in the Congo: there are knobs atop poles, which binoculars slide into ghastly focus as human skulls. Students underline and write in the margin to note the moment. ‘Shift of focus’, ‘skulls’, ‘revelation of barbarism’.
He might have been a playwright, working with Stephen Crane.
They meet in 1897. Crane is twenty-six, and already famous for The Red Badge of Courage. They instantly like each other. The young American is tubercular and a heavy smoker: Joseph looks into his thin, drawn face and sees a long-ago memory. He sees his father. The resemblance strikes him as uncanny.
Later, Crane proposes that he and Joseph write a drama together on the theme of shipwreck, or on a man impersonating his predecessor (who had died) to win the heart of a woman. Both topics might have appealed. By then they have already collaborated, as sailors, buying a small sailboat, the
Reine, which they sail together in the Channel: their faces in the wind, looking in the same direction, and their words blowing behind them, knitting and purling in a double skein as they speak. Crane dies in 1900 at the age of twenty-eight. Tainted breath, no skeining, no open boat. He is at Badenweiler in the Black Forest, exactly where Chekhov, four years later, dies of the same disease.
Joseph loves his Stevie. He loves his pale, wasted face.
He might have joined the Japanese navy.
After the suicide attempt, Joseph casts around for seafaring employment. It is a pause of self in which he entertains other nationalities as a sailor. In a letter to Uncle Tadeusz, Joseph mentions he has met the Japanese Consul in Marseilles. Tadeusz writes, ‘Perhaps you may become an Admiral in Japan?’
In a parallel life Joseph stands with the Consul in the vieux port and together they admire the sailing ships tilting and creaking, masts all in an angle, accentuating what he fancies is an impatience to depart. The port smell is like wine to him; the sound of men working is intoxicating. At this time, he wants to flee as far away as possible.
Joseph may have met the modernist/anarchist/poet Sadakichi Hartmann when he visited London in 1888. Hartmann, born in Nagasaki, and wildly transnational, would have introduced our novelist to tanka and haiku.
They look remarkably similar. Not at all unalike. Joseph sees in the mirror of Sadakichi’s face that he too has Japanese eyes; he sees Japan in himself; he needs to find himself there.
He might have married Marguerite (née Gachet) Poradowska.
The wife of a cousin, living in Brussels, she is beautiful, a published writer, and helps him secure work in the Belgian Congo. Her uncle is the tormented-looking Dr Paul Gachet, whom Vincent van Gogh had painted: this connection excites Joseph. When he returns from the Congo, Marguerite is a widow. He may have proposed to her and been rejected. Not the Intended, after all. He confides in Uncle Tadeusz, who points out that Marguerite is nine years older and entirely unsuitable. Still, Joseph attaches to her in a way he attaches to no other woman, and in correspondence later addresses her (safely) as ‘Aunt’.
At least two women earlier rejected Joseph’s proposals of marriage. Marguerite may have been the third.
The main portrait of Dr Gachet, in which he bears ‘a grimace of melancholy’, according to Van Gogh’s own written account, shocks the writer when he sees it. Gachet is seated at a table, leaning his lemon-yellow face on his hand, as though he cannot bear the weight of the world, and before him, in a jar, stands a blossom of purple digitalis. Van Gogh calls Dr Gachet his brother. Loveless Joseph sees a bond, a string of men alone and rejected, twisted as oil paint squeezed from a tube, lurid and mad looking. He imagines himself brother to Vincent van Gogh. Sometimes too, in the famed self-portraits, he sees a clear resemblance.
∼
He might have given up writing.
His manuscript for Almayer’s Folly, his first novel, which he had carried for years and which almost drowned with him in the Congo, was left in a café in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse train station. Tired from his overnight journey from Brussels, he absent-mindedly left behind a Gladstone bag containing his most precious possession. A kindly railway porter tracked him down and returned it. So it was lost, then found; but it might have been a vocation lost, and an entire future left rotting in a busy café.
There is a long, notorious history of writers losing their manuscripts.
In 1919 T. E. Lawrence left Seven Pillars of Wisdom, then a 250,000-word manuscript, in the café at Reading train station. The manuscript was never recovered. Start again.
In 1922 Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, lost the manuscripts of all his work up to that date at the Gare de Lyon. Disaster. Last straw. No hope for that marriage.
In 1932 a briefcase containing the manuscript of Malcolm Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, was stolen from his publisher’s car. In Ballast to the White Sea, his masterpiece, was lost in a fire. After his death a former wife revealed a secret copy.
In 1936 Edna St. Vincent Millay lost Conversation at Midnight in a hotel fire. Again. Start again.
In 1953 Dylan Thomas’s manuscript of Under Milk Wood went missing first in Cardiff, then in New York. It was lost for a third time in London, only to be recovered in a pub—so not lost, exactly, but carelessly wandering.
And much earlier, in 1865, Dickens’ manuscript of Our Mutual Friend was dragged blood-flecked from a train crash. Almost lost and enjoined, like the others, to the contingent history of any text.
There must be a hundred such examples, and many more featuring trains, fires or railway stations, each a tale of terror for any writer.
He might have become Australian.
His first long voyage is in 1878–79, on the Duke of Sutherland, from London to Sydney, round the Cape of Good Hope. Joseph passes his twenty-first birthday reading Flaubert’s Salammbô. In a time of slack passage in the doldrums, between dog watches and night watches, he sets himself on the sand with lusty generals and slave girls in Carthage. He crosses the equator for the first time, moving from pollywog to shellback in a drowning initiation supervised by King Neptune.
Oh, drowning! No, no! How he splutters, ignominiously. How the salt in his eyes stings and looks like tears. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. The others are all laughing.
But on arrival at Sydney he spends four months in Circular Quay and mostly stays on board ship, writing his first novel. One night, as nightwatchman, he is given a black eye by a night prowler. This, other than writing, is his main event in Australia. But he listens to Australian English; he eats delicious apples, cadmium red; he samples food bought from the Chinese vendors living in ‘the Rocks’ by the water; he finds himself gaining weight and, after the equator drowning, restored.
A fellow countryman, the explorer Strzelecki, named Australia’s highest mainland mountain Kosciuszko, in honour of the national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Joseph enjoys this connection; he likes the metonymy of names and their associations. He derives shameless, imperial pleasure from seeing a Polish name on an Australian map. Kosciuszko.
In idle moments he imagines he looks like Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
He drinks in the Sydney air. Winter here is surprisingly mild and good for the lungs. He sits on the deck of the moored boat, smoking, solitary, and listens to all the human and creaturely voices of the south. The descending sun drags a crimson flare in its wake. The sky at dusk fills with trails of peculiar birdsong. Bats fly overhead, rising and veering together, all moving in the same direction, all flowing as if behind a vessel that rides a tide in the sky. And at night a host of noctilucent clouds appear, a bright, streaming sign, a benediction.
It is a freedom to be here, under such an animated sky. The peace of Circular Quay invites him to stay.
Circular Quay: he loves even the sound of it. Sydneysiders are welcoming and tolerant of his accent. When he returns to London he will sign on immediately for another passage to Australia.
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When Helen arrived back at Newnham from the library, Justin was at the door of the Porter’s Lodge, charming the porter. Old Harry was showing Justin a photograph of his four grandchildren, which he kept in his wallet. He was proud, she knew, of the family resemblance, even though it seemed to her largely unapparent. Approaching from behind, Helen saw how well they got on.
‘Yes!’ said Justin. ‘They all look exactly like you! Dead spit. Spitting image.’
The porter blurted out an appreciative laugh. ‘Too right!’
Then he saw Helen and raised his hand in hallo. ‘And here she is, my favourite girl! Afternoon, Gladdie.’
Helen was touched by his gruff voice and his evident affection. She had once told Harry the plot of an E. W. Hornung novel, The Bush Bride, the tale of an Australian woman who outwits London toffs and her in-laws, Lord and Lady Bligh, in her ‘lacerating’ accent. Gladys, Gladdie to her besotted husband, makes every possible faux pas. She is a social catastrophe.
Harry smiled. ‘Gladdie and me, we have some fine old chinwags, don’t we, Gladdie?’
She handed over the bar of chocolate he had asked her to buy. He fumbled for coins and she waved away his intention. ‘Next time.’
‘Gladdie?’ Justin was both amused and derisive.
He stood his ground. Helen thought of their single beds, the hot mess of their sheets, and how close they had been. Despite everything, she felt the erotic pull of his presence.
Neither spoke, and Harry must have sensed the tension between them. He was no doubt practised at this, dealing as a guardian with disgruntled boyfriends, watching carefully what he may have thought of as lovers’ tiffs.
But Justin turned fiercely on Harry and said, ‘Now you just piss off.’
The old man defended his role. ‘Watch your language, boy.’ He hovered nearby, already anxious to intercede.
Helen nodded to Harry to show that she could manage, but Justin seized her arm and pulled her aside. Though she wrenched, he did not let go. He drew her towards him and then pushed her backwards, forcing her against the wall. She felt her back contact the stone, felt it hard there, and his hardness too, and how much taller and stronger he was, and how pugnacity had made him bold. The trellis beside her was quivering with tiny white blooms.
‘Enough!’ But Harry sounded afraid. In his voice she heard how the sudden shift in Justin’s manner had surprised and alarmed him. He retreated, calling out, ‘Phoning the police! Right now!’
She said the wrong thing. She said, ‘You’re acting like a child.’
It worked as an incitement. Justin leaned the weight of his sullen, vicious body against her, pressing her harder to the wall, insisting on his will. Harry might have been watching or phoning, but Helen saw only radiating power, how Justin was caught in the moment and enjoying her fear.
And then Harry was beside them. ‘Ease off, matey.’
Justin swung and the old man fell. He went down with an audible, horrific thud. Justin seemed to wince, then grin wickedly, then he turned and hurried away. Harry muttered, ‘No bother, no bother,’ but the distress was evident in his blubbery mouth and the spittle on his chin and the skewed look he had, of one hit and uncomprehending.
‘Seemed,’ he stammered. ‘Seemed a nice fellow.’
